Many exchanges throughout the world now support electronic trading. Generally, an electronic exchange provides a matching process between traders, or simply buyers and sellers. Some well known exchanges include Eurex, London International Financial Futures Exchange (“LIFFE”), Euronext, Chicago Mercantile Exchange (“CME”), Chicago Board of Trade (“CBOT”), Xetra, and Island. Traders are typically connected to an electronic exchange by way of a communication link to facilitate electronic messaging between the trader and the exchange.
For instance, the trader might submit buy or sell orders to an electronic exchange and later obtain status or fill information from the exchange. Among other things, ease of submitting buy or sell orders has made electronic exchanges a successful venue for trading. Accordingly, an increasing number of people across the world are actively participating in a market at any given time. The increase in the number of potential market participants has advantageously led to, among other things, a more competitive market and greater liquidity.
A trader can connect to an exchange, for example, using a client device, and the exchange can serve as a host. Once connected, software running on the client allows the trader to log onto one or more exchanges and participate in one or more markets. Some clients run software that creates specialized interactive trading screens. In general, the trading screens enable traders to enter orders into the market, obtain market quotes, and monitor positions. The range and quality of features available varies according to the specific trading application.
One such feature generally displayed by a trading screen is the current market depth, which includes a number of price levels and the outstanding bid or ask quantities corresponding to the price levels. While the market may include outstanding bid and ask quantities at a multitude of different price levels, the trading screen may not be physically large enough to accommodate displaying all of the different price levels and their outstanding bid or ask quantities. Thus, a trading screen typically displays a range of price levels around the inside market.
Displaying a small range of price levels around the inside market, however, may provide a trader with a narrow view of the market. The trader may view the market depth around the inside market, but the trader may not be able to see the outstanding market depth at price levels further away from the inside market. This problem may be accentuated depending on the “tick” size used by the market or the client software. A tick generally refers to the smallest tradeable price level graduation in the market.
A market may use any measure for a tick. For example, a tick may represent a fraction of a dollar or another currency, or a tick may represent a decimal portion of a dollar or another currency. When displaying smaller ticks, the trading screen displays an increasingly narrow view of the current market. For example, using a graduation of one cent, a trader may only be able to see price levels a few cents away from the inside market. The market, however, may have bids and asks outstanding over a range of several dollars away from the inside market, but the trader may not be able to see these other outstanding bids and asks due to the narrow range of price levels within the viewable area of the trading screen.
In the following detailed description, a trading application and trading interface for displaying consolidated price and quantity information are described. These tools provide advantages, as described below, to a trader in an electronic trading environment.